Part one: Film editing. The ghost of 47th Street : senses plus mind equals reality -- The devil's black box and the snowflake : the effect of digitisation in fiction and documentary films -- Recutting Orson Welles's Touch of evil : 'he was some kind of a man' -- Nodality : a defence of film editing as poetry -- The droid Olympics : when film editing was a competitive sport -- Saccadic cinema : the uncanny persistence of the persistence of vision -- Tetris I : timing and dosage in editing The conversation -- Tetris II : restructuring The conversation -- N-VIS-O splicing : and the breezy darkness -- Her name was Moviola : the first editing machine -- Taking note : making comments on screenplays and screenings -- Standfleisch : your chair is your enemy -- The spliceosome : our lives depend on editing -- Hana and Harvey : canine ketamine -- Elements of style : read with caution . . . -- Cook Ting : 'at first, I could see nothing that was not ox' -- Part two: Sound design. Francis Coppola's special ballpoint pen : a 3 a.m. crisis in the mixing studio -- The dancing shadow : from king to queen -- Ode to Spo : the road to Apocalypse -- Because you DON'T LISTEN! : thoughts on the sound of Barton Fink -- Dense clarity/clear density : encoded and embodied sound and the rule of two and a half -- Dense clarity : further thoughts : dramatic polyphony -- You'll never work in this town again : and other studio follies -- Duality of the soul : mysteries of narration and dialogue replacement -- The many lives of sound effect 9413 : a Hollywood sound effect goes back to Nebraska -- 'Valkyries' in crisis : Decca vs Zoetrope -- The goddess Echo : an experiment in acoustics -- 'That's my squeak!' : the first sampling lawsuit and a long-delayed apology -- Manhattan symphony : redeem us from the chaos of shapeless noise -- The slope : coming back to earth after a long project -- The shape of things to come

"Highly lauded film editor, director, writer and sound designer Walter Murch reflects on the six decades of cinematic history he has been a considerable contributor to - and on what makes great films great. Together with Francis Coppola and George Lucas, Murch abandoned Hollywood in 1969 and moved to San Francisco to create the Zoetrope studio. Their vision was of a new kind of cinema for a new generation of film-goers. Murch's subsequent contributions in film editing rooms and sound-mixing theatres were responsible for ground-breaking technical and creative innovations. In this book, Murch invites readers on a voyage of discovery through film, with a mixture of personal stories, meditations on his own creative tactics and strategies, and reminiscences from working on The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Lucas' American Graffiti, and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Suddenly Something Clicked is a book that will change the way you watch movies."--